Anticipating the Singularity

I love Ray Kurzweil. I saw him once in a diner but I’ve never met him. I feel like I know him, though, and have benefitted so much from his published work.

However, I’m confused by this update on his new job with Google. Maybe he is simplifying for the interview, but his focus on language seemed off target. I also believe in Marvin Minsky’s “Society of Mind“, and see language as a small piece of the big picture.

I think the information architecture (how concepts are defined and connected) is much more important, and distinct from the language used to represent it. In other words, the reality is distinct from the words used to describe it. If you are a programmer, you might draw an analogy to the MVC framework, where the Model is the information architecture and the View is the language. If you are bilingual, you feel this.

If Kurzweil and his team focus on language, I hope they do so merely as an interface. They can look through the lens of language to build the AI, and users will use language to interact. But language seems like just an interface to the actual interesting work to be done building the singularity.